The Empire That Never Ended
When Identity Coopts the Soul (Mirror Neurons, Autism, Soul Connections, & the Art of Language, Part 3)
(Original art by Mrs Horsley)
(Audio version at the end of the piece for paid subscribers; the free segment of this piece is a reworking from a 2011 piece “Skywriters in Hades”; the paid section consists of new material that builds upon the original piece.)
Gandhi vs Guevara
“[M]irror neurons are multimodal—they are activated not just by watching actions, but also by hearing and reading about them. An effort led by Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, found that the brain’s premotor cortex shows the same activity when subjects observe an action as when they read words describing it. . . This indicates that in addition to execution, action observation, and the sounds of actions, these neurons may also be activated by abstract representations of actions, namely language. . . . ‘Research in the last few years seems to suggest that perception and action are tightly linked rather than separated,’ [Aziz-Zadeh] said.” —“Mirror Neurons Also Respond to Language and Sound,” SEED magazine Sept 21, 2006
In one study, cited in Up From Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence, a group of people imagining physical exercises increased their strength by 22%, as compared to a group performing actual exercises, whose strength increased by 30%. No wonder Jane Fonda’s workout video was such a success! If our muscles can improve simply by watching a fitness video, or even by reading about somebody working out, what about the countless acts of violence which we vicariously experience, day after day, in movies, novels, TV shows, comic books, rap songs, and social media?
It’s no wonder if the military has been the leading researcher of video game technology: if mirror neurons exist, then a soldier in training doesn’t know the difference—at a physiological level—between simulated acts of war and the real thing. And affective empathy is the foremost obstacle to creating effective soldiers: Che Guevara’s “killing machines.”1
Ironically, mirror neurons were nicknamed “Gandhi neurons” by Ramachandran because they are supposedly responsible for affective empathy—which is the capacity to actually feel other people’s emotions, rather than merely conceptualize them. Yet apparently an applied understanding of these neurons can (and will) be used to desensitize us to violence against others.
This is a subject for a whole other discussion; for now, my focus is on the efficiency of language to communicate, via mirror neurons, not only images (as in Stephen King’s example, from last week’s piece), but moods and even altered states of consciousness—and on how this correlates with physiological changes.
Dostoyevsky’s Brain: What Makes Great Writing
Whenever I read Crime and Punishment, for example (it’s been four or five times now), I go inside the mind—or under the skin—of Raskolnikov/Dostoyevsky. I identify with him so much that, for the duration of the book, his thoughts become my thoughts.
To a lesser extent, therefore, his decisions become my decisions, and his actions my actions. Obviously, this doesn’t happen literally—I don’t go out and murder a landlady and her half-sister every time I read the book. But if we take the scientists’ claims about mirror neurons seriously, then, to my brain, there may not be a difference.
Fortunately, in this case, Raskolnikov is the creation of a great writer’s mind—the child of his psyche—and a great writer like Dostoevsky uses legitimate means—intelligence, skill, wisdom, insight, compassion—to seduce me into his brain states as he attempts to wrestle his own inner criminal to the ground and subdue him. So I am not so much being taken over by Raskolnikov but by his creator. (And Raskolnikov himself undergoes a transformation in which his conscience is stirred to life by his crime.)
A combination of great writing with close (attentive) reading creates a trance state in me which involves matching the brain state of the author at the time of writing. Besides the telepathic connection across space and time which Stephen King describes, this implies that, contained in the words themselves, there’s a hidden information load, one that survives any number of translations or reprints, and yet remains invisible and undetectable in the text itself.
This idea obviously has major implications for the Christian belief in the Bible as “the word of God”: if at least some of the authors of the books in the Bible were “God-possessed” at the time of writing, potentially we would be able to have an equivalent experience while reading their words.
What makes Dostoyevsky a great writer compared to hundreds of thousands of others is that Dostoyevsky immersed himself so thoroughly in the writing process, was so consumed by it, that his brain state effectively fused with that of the characters he was creating, until there was very little distance between himself and his creations.
All good fiction achieves this to some extent: it creates in the reader a sense of authenticity, of immediacy, as if the events described were happening spontaneously, as we are reading them, rather than being worked out over time (years, even centuries, ago). by someone sitting at a desk chewing on his or her pencil, wondering what might be for lunch.
A writer who creates convincing characters and scenes does so by entering all the way into them, like an avatar into a simulation. The written text then becomes a kind of brain-scan taken from that time that recreates that world in our own brains, a download capturing the innermost thoughts and feelings of the writer, just as a recording of a singer, or a photograph of someone’s face, captures what was going on inside them at that moment. It is then up to us, the reader, to be sufficiently receptive to that information, and imaginative enough to “decode” it.
While Sherlock Holmes might be able to decode a large part of such information by consciously studying the text, recording, or photograph, and deducing it, for most of us this transference occurs unconsciously, with neither understanding nor awareness needed for it to happen. Yet happen it does. We can no more avoid picking up this hidden information load (the scanned world of the author’s brain) than the writer can avoid putting it into the writing.
The opposite example to that of a consummate artist like Dostoyevsky would be a writer who is unable or unwilling to close the gap between conscious intent (in writing) and whatever is going on in his or her unconscious. He or she might be writing about a murderer while thinking about whether they paid the water bill—or how this book is finally going to make them rich—and this then becomes the subtext of the story, and thereby renders it flat and unconvincing.
The result is a watered down portrait of a murderer, anemic and uninvolving because the author hasn’t allowed him or herself to be fully possessed by the act of creation, and by the inner and outer world of the creations.
We can see the strings, and no matter how well the puppets dance for us, we never forget that it is a puppet show. We feel the discrepancy between the words on the page and the author’s (and our) brain state. The words are unconvincing because, while we are trying to immerse ourselves in them, we are unconsciously matching the author’s brain state—and wondering what we will have for lunch.
Matrix Warrior: A Book Divided
“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.” —Truman Capote
In summer of 2002, in a period of two weeks, I wrote a book called Matrix Warrior: Being the One. It was an esoteric manifesto disguised as a self-help-satire based on the 1999 movie The Matrix, and it was intended to be a bestseller. My original title for it was “How to Succeed in the Matrix Without Trying,” and my idea was that the book would prove its own premise by making me rich.
Everything seemed to be proceeding marvelously as, after taking two weeks to write it, I had a publication deal two weeks after that, with an advance (my first and last) of £10,000, and a fast-tracked release for May 2003, to coincide with the first Matrix sequel.
As everyone who saw the sequel knows, this was when things started to go horribly and irreparably wrong. As an almost immediate result of the sequel’s release, and the unanimous realization that lighting had not struck twice, the ideas which my book was exploring went from something everyone had been contemplating, to something no one wanted to think about.
The other thing that “happened”—and which pertains more to this current piece—was the reception my book received. While some (such as Kenneth Grant, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Adam Roberts, and John P. Allen, who said I had crunched all of Nietzsche down to a single line2) embraced it as a profound commentary on our times, others took personal offense and derided it as “Zen fascism,” “turgid,” “humorless,” “a soggy trout,” and “about as pleasurable as sticking a sharpened pencil into your thigh.”
None of these were accurate descriptions of the book, but they may have got closer to describing the author’s brain state. And however many readers found the book enlightening, and entertaining, very few fell for my “cunning ruse” of disguising it as a satire. The book was taken seriously by both its supporters and its detractors, and both were correct: whatever my conscious design, I took its mix of Matrix with Carlos Castaneda and my own post-Nietzschean (or post-Crowleyean) philosophy very seriously indeed.
I had not written it merely “to get ahead in the matrix.” I had written it to undermine the accepted values and meanings of the system I found so oppressive, and so was divided in myself. I was claiming to be the One, offering the red pill in book form, while trying to emulate Cypher.
Nobody bought it. Literally. Hundreds of copies were pulped, though still not enough for it to be worth anything today. Two years after I wrote it, and a year after it came out, here’s what I said:
The ingenuity which inspired me to write Matrix Warrior—to use a cultural phenomenon of potentially revolutionary proportions as a way in to the mainstream—this cunning bit of coat-tailing by a writer/artist tired of thriving in obscurity—backfired on me. . . . The conscious and unconscious minds run on separate tracks. They work wholly different agendas, and as often as not, those agendas are at odds. Because I really believed in my book and its premise—that this world is an illusion and we are slaves to it—I couldn’t believe in its “supposed” selling point, its gimmick, that of exploiting the situation for personal gain. Matrix Warrior isn’t really about getting ahead in the matrix; it’s about getting the hell out. . . . But since I was determined to conceal such a grandiose and presumptuous [claim], I concealed it even from myself. I really thought I was writing Matrix Warrior to make an easy buck!
Epic fail. My text did not match my brain state, and it was this latter which communicated to my audience. Considering the kind of audience which a book of this apparent nature would attract, it’s understandable they wanted nothing to do with me. They smelled a rat and stayed away from the cheese buffet.
Those who were willing to match my brain state (at the time of writing the book) were far less in number; more importantly, they weren’t the (much larger) audience the book had been designed to attract (fans of the movie). This discrepancy between packaging and content mirrored a more fundamental discrepancy in the book itself, between the text and subtext, the message and the medium it was being communicated by. The medium and the message were at odds, and so the message was lost, the medium rejected.
As G.K. Chesterton said, “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
Since the hero of Matrix Warrior was its author, it did both.